The usual vegetables, low-fat meats, potatoes and low-fat dairy stuff such as cottage cheese. I have a strategy where I eat vegetables and chicken breast as my first meal and I try to keep most of the fat and carb calories for the evening, when I feel the most hungry and inclined to cheat.

I find low fat easier for dieting because the volume of solid food I eat is still a lot of food to get through

It's amazing how energy dense fat is and how eating high fat food reduces your portion sizes down so much for the same caloric intake. Makes me feel like I didnt get to eat much

Agreed. People hate the idea of dieting because they envision lean cuisines. If you condense your eating window a little bit, incorporate full body weightlifting, and eat relatively clean foods it certainly never feels like the amount of food you are eating is small.

A typical meal for me is 1 lb of 96% ground beef, half a box of high protein pasta, with half tomato sauce, half salsa, and some bell peppers and jalapeņos and no fat cheese. It's a giant meal. I add a whey protein shake with peanut butter and banana post workout. And a sweet potato. Pocorn and veggies for snacks. protein bar preworkout. Kashi cereal, oikos yogurt, and quaker oatmeal are all pretty frequent staples. Eggs before bed. I average half a gallon of skim milk per day. 10g of fish oil religiously. It's quite a lot of volume of food.

And that's basically what I ate everyday while i relatively quickly dieted down to 150 pounds at 6'0. I don't have a lot of sympathy for a 5'9, 220 lb person who can't seem to lose weight. They just aren't doing it correctly. You don't have to give up eating a lot of food to lose a lot of weight. You have to give up eating the wrong food.

And the reality is most people are so overweight that they really don't even have to Diet to lose 1-2 lbs a week. They just have to eat like a normal we'll adjusted adult should and the weight will come off. Dieting and weight loss is much more of a mental health issue than anyone ever wants to believe. If you address the underlying problems I feel like a lot of people can't help but lose weight.

A typical meal for me is 1 lb of 96% ground beef, half a box of high protein pasta, with half tomato sauce, half salsa, and some bell peppers and jalapeņos and no fat cheese. It's a giant meal. I add a whey protein shake with peanut butter and banana post workout. And a sweet potato. Pocorn and veggies for snacks. protein bar preworkout. Kashi cereal, oikos yogurt, and quaker oatmeal are all pretty frequent staples. Eggs before bed. I average half a gallon of skim milk per day. 10g of fish oil religiously. It's quite a lot of volume of food.

Pffft....

That sounds like dieting on over 2000 calories a day.

Some good points and I get that you are a guy, just maybe not the best example of how "dieting isn't hard" because for a lot of smaller people that looks like bulking.

I had a friend get cancer, went through chemo, all that. Went from obese to fairly normal looking. I guess that was pretty successful.

For me, pretty much any diet I tried and stuck to has worked well. I've done a lot of different things over the years when I got to my cutting phases. UD2.0 was great for getting to sub-10% but was hard to manage around a variable work schedule. RFL is great too, I love kicking off a more flexible diet with it. IF was great but obviously you still have to manage overall calories on that. It's easy to overeat in the window if you just go crazy.

Of course, if you don't stick with your diet then it won't matter which one you choose. Everyone I work with has opinions about which diet is best, which has worked for them, etc, but approximately none of them have cut down below 15% so who cares. Every diet is going to suck at some point, so you just have to toughen up and bear it if you want to actually get the results you are looking for.

For me the only way of eating maintenance/sub-maintenance calories that has worked long term is to save as many calories for the evening as possible.

So, basically protein all day except for veggies. In the evening I eat one plate of a "normal" dinner (wife cooks), which I look forward to every day and keeps me sane. Then, I get one evening on the weekend where we go out to eat and I get to have whatever I want (another sanity requirement).

This has become a set-it-and-forget-it way of life for me without struggle. Other than those evening dinners, I eat the exact same thing for every other meal (egg whites, chicken/veggies, protein shakes).

RFL type macros during the week with 1-2 short workouts. Weekends are more flexible with carbs and longer/harder workouts. I've found I can maintain strength very well and get quite lean with this approach (single digit BF).